LITMIR.BIZ

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agenda usually was in tune with the Executioner’s. But Bolan would decide on his own whether or not to accept the mission.

      Bolan had remained silent, studying the transcript he’d been reading as they’d walked.

      “What’s this about another 9/11?” he asked.

      “That’s the part that has the President most concerned,” Brognola answered. “The CIA doesn’t need any help dealing with these guys if they’re just a bunch of crackpots trying to make a statement. But, if what we’re up against is an organized terrorist cell with the capability to carry out those threats, we have to know who they are, and we have to know it now. All the President wants you to do is to get the CIA pointed in the right direction.”

      It had been the part about another September 11 that had convinced Bolan to take the assignment.

      He had met with Edmund Fontes, the director of CIA activities in Ireland, who’d reluctantly given him Steven Oxford’s final field report. In it, the late agent had described Cypher and the terrorist cell the mysterious man was forming, but there was no mention of any targets other than Catholic organizations in Ireland.

      “He was one of my best,” Fontes had said tersely while handing Bolan the report, “and, if it was up to me, we’d go in and get him, ourselves. This is our job, and we don’t like someone else doing it.”

      Bolan took no umbrage at the CIA man’s resentment. The way he received missions all but guaranteed that he’d be treading on someone else’s turf from the minute he showed up. He’d go in, get the microchip for Brognola, the one Oxford had in a back molar, and see what developed from there.

      Now, twenty-four hours after saying he’d take the assignment, he was on-site, closing in on his objective.

      An animal howled in the distance, and Bolan paused to take his bearings. Close by, a freight train rumbled over tracks on its way to the industrialized areas to the north.

      The homing signal’s beat suddenly picked up, and Bolan’s senses went on full alert. With the terrain’s undulating dips and swells dotted with sparse patches of tall bushes and wind-blown hickory trees, the area was perfect for an ambush.

      Bolan walked quickly, his eyes scanning the darkness, his free ear processing a steady flow of sounds. Noise carried well over the moors. Not as well as over water, where the crack of a gunshot could carry for miles.

      He heard them before they were aware of his presence. A metallic click lasting no more than a millisecond rode to his ears on the night’s currents. It might have been the sound of a buckle that hadn’t been taped, or a snap fastening someone’s top collar against the breeze, but to a soldier with Bolan’s honed senses, it just as well could have been a bullhorn announcing their location.

      Dropping to one knee, he reached into the pouch on his web belt containing his night-vision goggles. As he adjusted the goggles on his face, Bolan turned off his earpiece. He’d deal with the ambush first, then locate Oxford. From the signal he had been getting and the direction he thought the errant sound came from, his greeting party appeared to be positioned close to his objective.

      Bolan focused the goggles, bringing the moors into sharp relief. There was a flurry of movement off to his left as a pair of jackrabbits dodged and sprinted their way through the underbrush. He scanned from left to right, pausing at every patch of bushes and trees, watching for unnatural movement. A halo of light flared briefly, the flame of a cigarette lighter magnified tens of thousands of times as its photons passed through the photocathode tube of his goggles.

      Amateurs, Bolan thought. Undisciplined, untrained amateurs.

      He switched the goggles to infrared mode, and the scene before him shimmered slightly as he painted the landscape with IR. Three men were positioned in a clump of trees about a hundred yards off to his right, their figures clear and distinct against the cooler foliage. A slight spiral extended upward from the man who was smoking, his cigarette heating the air directly above him.

      Bolan removed the goggles and returned them to their pouch. The men waiting for him obviously knew that Oxford was wearing a transmitter that would lead someone to his remains. Did they also know that he had been a CIA plant? And, if they did, what were their intentions now for the man who came to retrieve him?

      Regardless of what they had been planning, the Executioner thought they were about to get more than they’d bargained for.

      He rose into a crouch and set off, as silent as an owl swooping from above to snatch unsuspecting prey. When he finally got to a point about twenty yards behind them and they became visible in the dim light, he lowered himself again to one knee and took note of how the three were set up. He figured they would be facing his objective. He switched the earpiece back on.

      The beat was coming in as an almost steady tone, and the note had changed, indicating Bolan was slightly off center. Before turning the signal off, he mentally extrapolated the sound with his position and that of the ambush, arriving at a spot about fifty yards from where he thought Oxford’s body would be buried.

      He withdrew a powerful penlight from his front shirt pocket and rotated the lens to produce a beam. Sliding the Desert Eagle from its holster, he stood and took a step forward.

      “Everyone freeze!” he shouted in a voice full of authority as he held it out at a full arm’s length to the left of his body.

      The three men, suddenly illuminated, simultaneously made the wrong decision. As the two men flanking the third threw themselves to the ground, the man in the middle turned and fired a pistol, the round snapping the air directly beneath Bolan’s penlight, which he switched off while lunging to his right. In midair, he squeezed the Desert Eagle’s trigger once, and the throaty roar of the weapon delivered instant death to his attacker as the heavy round slammed through the man’s chest, exiting through his back in a messy hole the size of a heavyweight’s fist.

      Bolan rolled quickly as bullets from the other two gunmen sliced the air where he had been a split second earlier. Using one of the muzzle-flashes for a target, Bolan fired two shots so close together that they echoed across the moors as a single retort. He immediately heard the heavy thump of a body being hammered into hard earth, and all was still.

      Continuing his roll to the right, Bolan strained his ears for the sound of his enemy’s breathing. In the sudden silence, he could hear it—raspy and quick. The man was off to his left, about ten yards away, and apparently still standing upright.

      Bolan considered taking him alive in order to gain some intel about the communiqué. Before he could initiate his next move, however, panic apparently got the better of his adversary, who abruptly let loose with a barrage of automatic pistol fire aimed a full four feet above Bolan. With the shooter illuminated by his series of quick muzzle-blasts, Bolan zeroed in from his prone position and fired once, drilling a hole through the man’s gut. The force of the Eagle’s .44-caliber punch threw the hardman four feet and he crumpled into a lifeless heap, oozing intestines that shimmered and shone black in the intermittent moonlight.

      Like most firefights, this one had been quick and violent.

      The acrid smell of cordite hung heavy in the air, mingling with the fresh stink of death that filled Bolan’s nostrils. He remained in his prone position, listening intently for any sound of life. After a good thirty seconds, he rose to his full height. Holding the penlight out to his left again, he switched it on.

      All three men were dead.

      Bolan quickly scanned the area, anxious to complete his mission. There was no vehicle, which meant that these men had either left their means of transportation somewhere and walked to the site as Bolan had, or they had been dropped off by other team members who were still very much alive.

      In the beam of his penlight, tire tracks were visible in the dirt, confirming Bolan’s worst-case hunch. He rushed forward to check the bodies, intent on removing any identification they might be carrying. As he patted down the first corpse, he noticed the gleam of a silver chain around the man’s neck. With the same motion he had used more often than he wanted to remember when pulling

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